Personal Finance, better balance your income to expense

Personal Finance education or making people aware of better personal finance management skills, still I found to be a topic need addressed for the time being.

Typical example of ciaos of personal finances effect on economy goes like this...

Poor personal Finance management > Individuals borrowing money on credit > Poor planning cause individuals to not able to pay the borrowed money back in time > Banks that lend money in trouble > Banks asking for help from the government to survive > Bailout plan from Gov using tax payer money > Government debt sky rockets

The circle goes on and on as long as Banks continue to lend money to individuals that has no long-term solid means for repaying.

Personal Finance : Filing for Taxes year 2008

This is the second episode of the personal finance series which is devoted to educate you continuously for the futures to come. Today the main focus of this post is laid on taxes as we are getting closer to the tax filing period. You should be receiving your W-2 forms to your mail box if not they can be accessed online by your green employee.
Filing for taxes as an individual or as a family as soon as you received the W-2 forms, will allow you to receive your withheld funds returned to you sooner. Most individuals are used to filing taxes by old fashioned paper based method. The fact is that paper based filing of taxes takes longer to reach the IRS and the same with your state. Wouldn’t you want to see your money which was first derived from your paycheck and withheld by the IRS, be sent to you as soon as possible and perhaps you could use that money is this tough economic times? The trick is to file for taxes as soon as you can.
Filing for taxes online is another way you could speed up the refund process. Most of the time your state might have their own website set up for state and county tax filing. That is something worth looking into if you are in desperate need for that tax money. IRS on the other hand, do not have an online base filing system directly in association with them, although there are other private companies out there doing this function. More information about this can be found at http://www.irs.gov/efile/index.html. Given the fact that these separate private organizations striving to provide an online Federal tax filing services, I myself try to stay out it and use the old fashioned paper and mailing which still seem to refund my money faster.
Another faster way to get your returns is having the money deposited directly to your bank checking account. Intuitively sending a check in mail is time consuming in comparison to a direct deposit, and that should make sense to you.
Some of the forms that you might need for your tax filing purposes can be found as pdf format at http://www.irs.gov/formspubs/lists/0,,id=97817,00.html and your public library should have copies of required tax documents. I hope this episode of the personal finance entrenched you to be more knowledgeable about your own finances.

Personal Finance; Tracking your income

Have you ever wondered what happen to the 60 dollars of cash you withdrew from bank two days ago. Where did all that money go? If you are careless about how much money you spend and 60 dollars is a drop in your paycheck then you probably don’t care about where those 60 dollars went. But for most Americans in this recession times, it is very important to save every penny you can and for them 60 dollars is a lot of money. As most research consumer report suggested, Americans are becoming more eager at saving money today and waiting for that big deal. The 70% off coupon for JC Pennys…

For an average American it is always a great thing to keep track of you spendings not only during troubled economies but all time. Take the initiative to balance your check books and stay on top of your money spendings. The key in learning personal finance is once you have a good track on expenditure, you can see in front of you what exactly caused the expense. Not only that, having the knowledge of expense will alert you where you need to cut down on spendings and where you need to control yourself. For example if you have a big portion of your spending allocated to eating out or paying for fast food restaurants and you want to reduce your spendings, this knowing of your spendings at fast food places will provide you the urge to avoid yourself from eating out and finding other alternatives such as cooking.

Analyzing the behavior of humans in finance, people tend to spend more and more on ‘not-necessary for survival’ items assuming they still have large portion of money left in their bank account. The fact that you still have lot of money left after you spend on that item is the motivation that kept humans from spending on such items. Remember you are assuming you will have more money left after you spend, but sooner or later people realize they were wrong. And the surprising discovery of very smaller amount of money left than they expected. Keeping track of personal spending will allow you to know your bank balances all time, and will tell you when to stop spending and when you need to stop spending.

To stay on top of your personal finance it is a must to keep track of your personal finances and organize your spending habits and have a good understanding of your finances. There are several personal finance products out there to assist you. Top of the list is quicken which is selling for $39.99 and up. Such programs are targeted at individuals new to personal finance and in a very generic program format to fit all. After reviewing quicken and finding out the rigid format and lack of customizable features, I have designed an excel based 100% customizable account balance spread sheet. I am planning on introducing my version of personal finance excel edition in the future along with next articles of personal finance educational blog posts. I hope you enjoyed todays insight of personal finance, please look forward to the next educational blog post.

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